Sir Cecil Beaton (1904 –1980) was an English fashion, portrait and war photographer, painter, diarist and Academy Award–winning stage and costume designer. They accumulated year after year, and from a formidable pile of notebooks he extracted enough to fill six volumes.
Published by National Portrait Gallery, London, 2020.
At the end of his college career in 1925, he had set up his own successful photography studio.
Hugo Vickers is a writer and broadcaster, who has written biographies of many twentieth century figures, including the Queen Mother, Gladys, Duchess of Marlborough, Cecil Beaton, Vivien Leigh, a study of Greta Garbo, Alice, Princess Andrew of Greece, and his book, The Private World of The Duke and Duchess of Windsor was illustrated with pictures from their own collection. Educated at Harrow and St. John’s College, Cambridge, Beaton picked up photography on his own. As one of the 20th century's most important photographers, Cecil Beaton documented lives both famous and quotidian in dozens of scrapbooks now held by Sotheby's London. Sir Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton (January 14, 1904 – January 18, 1980) was an English fashion and portrait photographer. Cecil Beaton began to use a visitors' book in 1930 when he moved to Ashcombe House in Wiltshire. In the course of his decades-long career as a photographer for Vogue and Vanity Fair, as well as a British war correspondent, Beaton helped invent the cult of the celebrity image. The stylish and extravagant world of the “Bright Young Things” of 1920s and ’30s London, seen through the eye of renowned British photographer Cecil Beaton . For almost as long as he could write, Cecil Beaton kept his diaries. A 'who's who' of the 20th century, it contains the signatures of Greta Garbo, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dali and the Queen Mother, among many celebrities and luminaries who visited Beaton at home.
Text by Robin Muir.